normal service in the process of resuming your patience is appreciated

We do not quite have business as usual ("What's usual?" "What's business?" "What's a cow?") but we're getting there.

The problem with getting back to business as usual is, it doesn't happen until the crap-ton of Overdue gets dealt with. I found this out last week. Last week I tried to have Normal Writing Workdays and just peck away at the Overdue Crap in between regular daily writing tasks. I thought, heck, we're in the roller derby off-season now. Plus this is a week culminating in a fifth Friday, so no Fictionette release is due! This should be easy. However, it was not easy. Turns out I have to put the Normal Writing Workday on hold in order to just get the Overdue done in one big heave. Then, that heave having worn me out, I hibernate.

So last week turned into the Week of Catching Up on All the Things and also napping. But now that the Overdue has been successfully reduced to a manageable amount, I can return to the original plan of having Normal Writing Workdays and, between those tasks, continuing to peck away at what remains of the Overdue.

(What is the Overdue? It is so very many things. It is household bills and accounting. It is travel plans and doctor appointments. It is email and league communications and those league committee tasks for which I am responsible. It is housecleaning, random mending and repair jobs, to-do items that have been on the to-do list for so long that I mistake them for part of the stationery design. It is a lot. And each overdue task has not only a time-and-effort cost associated with completing that task but also a non-trivial emotional weight associated with simply knowing that these tasks are due and that each minute not spent doing them is another minute that they are overdue. Why yes, I may indeed have anxiety issues, now that you mention it.)

Signs that we are nearly back to business as usual and that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train:

I made tortillas this morning! I had never made tortillas before. They were easy! I filled them with a yummy chicken-yam-eggplant mixture from yesterday's crock-pot session, and that was breakfast.

I went to the Shuttles Spindles Skeins spin-in tonight for the first time in more than a year. Now my ankles and calves are sore. Treadling a spinning wheel is kind of a work-out, y'all. I'd forgotten, what with how long it's been since I last used my wheel.

For the first time in almost a month, I got a blog post out that wasn't a weekend YPP blockade report. Here it is! Go me.

So that's the State of the Niki report. Hi. I will try not to be so out of touch going forward.

Real quick: Since I didn't blog all month and thus didn't get to tell you about them at the appropriate time, here's a brief round-up of the Friday Fictionettes released in September, with accompanying links.

For those of y'all just tuning in, the Friday Fictionette Project is a flash fiction subscription service powered by Patreon. Subscribers (Patrons) get access to a new "fictionette," which is to a say a short-story-like object, every first through fourth Friday as an ebook ($1/month) and/or audiobook ($3/month) depending on their pledge tier. At the end of every month, one of the four fictionettes released that month becomes available to all and sundry. (If you're thinking, "That sounds kind of cool, and the price is right, but I just don't know if I dig this author's writing style," browsing the archive for the "freebie" tag might help you figure that out.)

YPP Weekend Blockades, September 30-October 1: Can't put it off any longer

I'm late and I'm also at a location with verrrrry sllllowwww internet, so this blockade report is coming at about one third the usual speed. Alas and alack! But while I'm waiting for my login to the Opal Ocean to resolve, I can tell you this much:

Dark Seas has launched on Steam!

Steam exclusivity has gone into effect for Dark Seas!

Blockades on the Obsidian Ocean are coming. Soonish.

So, yes, I have finally consented to download Steam and register a username there. Grumbling the whole while. Also, my username was taken. I ask you, who else in the history of the internet ever uses "vortexae"? Seriously? With an email address ending in @g***.a*? Is that "gmail.au"? Is that a thing? Has someone with an Australian gmail account taken the username I've employed since high school? Well. If you're looking for me on steam and you want to say hi, you can instead find me hiding under the very obscure username "nicolejleboeuf".

All right, I've finally given up and moved to a location with an internet connection that's somewhat faster than the speed of molasses in winter. Keep reading for this weekend's blockade schedule. Good luck, have fun, puzzle hard, shoot cannons, earn PoE!

Standard reminders: Schedule is given in Pirate Time, or U.S. Pacific. Player flags link to Yoweb information pages; Brigand King Flags link to Yppedia Brigand King pages. BK amassed power given in parenthetical numbers, like so: (14). For more info about jobbing contacts, jobber pay, and Event Blockade battle board configuration, check the Blockade tab of your ocean's Notice Board. To get hired, apply under the Voyages tab.

YPP Weekend Blockades, September 9-10: Karma for conquerors; also, Dark Seas comes to Steam at last

Sometimes Saturday means not only a new Puzzle Pirates blockade schedule, but also a catch-up scramble for writing stuff I didn't get done during the week. Which is to say, the Friday Fictionette for September 8 is a little late. But it is out now for your perusal and delectation/scorn (circle one)! Please enjoy "Intervention" (Patrons may download the full text as an ebook or audiobook), a vignette about sentience in small electronic appliances and Regrets with a capital R.

Awright! Back to the pew-pew-pew. Crayon Box appears to be the target of choice on Emerald; having harassed their way into multiple island grabs last weekend, they are now suffering the subsequent wrath of the rest of the ocean. Knockout, Spoon Republic, and relative newcomer Bon Appetit are their uninvited guests. Even the brigand kings are going after Crayon Box.

On Meridian, ain't nothin' doin'. Not yet, anyway.

Update: Sunday blockade on Moab added!

On Cerulean, Riding High will be attacking Cnossos Island, currently owned by The Phoenix Rises, at noon today. "Why?" Doggbreath asks rhetorically. "For the wrong reason..."

This is not about sportsmanship - good, bad or indifferent, about displaying our amazing prowess on the blockade board, or even because we dislike anybody. It is about economics, pure & simple. Business is slow and we don't want to keep paying an extra 10% in rent to a semi-active flag.

There you go--principles in action.

Meanwhile, Dark Seas is set to launch on Steam real soon now. Early access will begin September 14, if nothing occurs to push the release back. Oceanmaster Cronus has all the info in this thread. (Looks like I'm going to have to cave in and install Steam finally; after the beta test is over, that will be the only way to access the Obsidian Ocean.) To support the final release of Dark Seas, the OMs are looking for to hire a video editor who can produce game trailers. They also invite the community to submit video clips and screenshots to help create the Steam store page.

Standard reminders: Schedule is given in Pirate Time, or U.S. Pacific. Player flags link to Yoweb information pages; Brigand King Flags link to Yppedia Brigand King pages. BK amassed power given in parenthetical numbers, like so: (14). For more info about jobbing contacts, jobber pay, and Event Blockade battle board configuration, check the Blockade tab of your ocean's Notice Board. To get hired, apply under the Voyages tab.

politics, postcards, and solid daily gottas

So, today got unexpectedly political. I mean, the political component of the day was expected, but my participation was unexpectedly high and early in the day. There were multiple faxes to send, some through Resistbot and some from a physical fax machine, and also postcards to write. So between that and some more routine household chores, my writing got a little crowded out and whittled down to just the daily gottas.

They were good solid daily gottas, though. And good solid household chores, too. I'm not displeased with how my day went. But I do wish the political crises obliging good citizens to action could pace themselves a little rather than piling up all on the same day. Well. One does what one must, given the crises one has.

I did want to talk about those postcards a little. I've started volunteering with Postcards to Voters, which is exactly what it sounds like: get-out-the-vote postcard-writing campaigns for specific key elections. (The current campaign is in support of Annette Taddeo's bid for Florida State Senate District 40 on September 26.) You get started by sending an email to "join" at "tonythedemocrat.org." Then they send you an email telling you how it works and what's expected of you and your postcards. Then you reply with a photo of your first postcard so they can make sure you understand the rules of the road. If you do and your postcard shows it, they send you addresses and you start sending people your postcards.

So that's a thing I'm doing with postage stamps and fountain pens and markers and watercolors and stuff. Activism is fun!

Real quick: Last week's fictionette--which was out on time I'll have you know only I wasn't able to get to the blog to say so that evening--was a bit of a romp called "Love, Death, and Really Bad Movies" (ebook, audiobook). It's about a disastrous first date and also a frustrated serial killer.

It's a weekend for multi-drop blockades, when Trap House will attack Barely Dressed in five places at once on the Meridian Ocean, Knockout and Lit and Crayon Box will attack each other all over the Emerald Ocean, and, on Cerulean, Admiral Finius is pretty much moving in on everyone. Saturday is just packed.

(Then there's a BK attack tomorrow on Meridian's Napi Peak.)

With September comes a new Seal o' Piracy to strive for. This month's requires you to perform 4 different crafting sessions. No need for a subscription or a labor badge if you're patient; just wait for each of your four favorite labor puzzles to come around on the freeplay schedule. Saturday's free labor puzzle is Shipwrightery. Friday's was Distilling. (Friday's free game in real life was Bingo. Turns out, Bingo multitasks with Distilling quite well.)

While I was distilling around on all my pirates on all the oceans, I spotted a rare sight: Doubloons offered for sale at 5000 PoE on the Meridian Ocean. It went 16,000, then 15,000, then 5,050, 5,025, 5,000. Alas, the reasonably priced doubloons got crowded off the market again by the time I checked this morning. But at least the top offer was "only" 17,000 rather than 21,000. Maybe the market-jacking yahoos are getting bored, or, more likely, discovering their get-rich-quick scheme has limits. We can only hope.

Standard reminders: Schedule is given in Pirate Time, or U.S. Pacific. Player flags link to Yoweb information pages; Brigand King Flags link to Yppedia Brigand King pages. BK amassed power given in parenthetical numbers, like so: (14). For more info about jobbing contacts, jobber pay, and Event Blockade battle board configuration, check the Blockade tab of your ocean's Notice Board. To get hired, apply under the Voyages tab.

in which a tedious writing exercise becomes inconveniently interesting

The long blog silence is testimony to the truth of the adage "After derby is too late." Not a universal adage, admittedly, but a fairly reliable one in my little universe. So today I'm blogging before derby. Just before. Instantaneously before. I'm in fact sitting at the folding table in the Officials' Corner at our practice location, and I have until they arrive and need to actually use this table to get this blog post done. Go me!

(I think I will be able to manage posting it after derby. There is no wifi at our practice location unless I beg use of someone's smartphone uplink. And smartphones notoriously fail to get signal in our practice location.)

I found a little time earlier this week to play around with interactive fiction. In Melissa Ford's book Writing Interactive Fiction, I had just got to the Designing Agency section--it's pretty early on in the book, I'm not moving through it particularly quickly--and worked through the Beanstalk exercise. The exercise has, to my thinking, two purposes: It gives you more practice using Twine to give the reader/protagonist choices, and it focuses your attention on whether those choices are meaningful. If they aren't, the interactive fiction isn't.

The exercise was to write a sort of Jack and the Beanstalk... sequel? Alternate plot? Basically, the giant is threatening to come down the beanstalk and STEAL YOUR SISTER. Oh noes! The first scene must end with two options, and each of two ensuing scenes must end with two options, which means there will be four possible endings.

I was not enthusiastic about this.

(Oh, crap, it's 6:30 already. I have to go put my skates on. I will finish this after derby! I will!)

(And now it is 10:00 PM. I'm a little more bruised and a lot more tired than I was when I left off. Now... where did I leave off? Oh. Right.)

I was not enthusiastic about this. I had absolutely no desire to rewrite Jack and the Beanstalk, much less in four permutations. But that was my assignment, so, darn it, I was doing it.

Forty-five minutes and 1,500 words later, I had done it and it wasn't so bad. Having no love for damsel in distress storylines, I had worked every branch toward the revelation that Jack's little sister had become a soldier competent to lead an army. The reader's choices would determine where she and Jack stood as siblings. In one, they were teammates working together to defeat the giant. In another, they were enemies, traitor and betrayed, and Jack wound up exiled for his sins.

It was all very silly, but it still managed to capture my interest by the end of it. That night, on my way to sleep, I couldn't stop thinking about ways to expand the story into something actually worth reading. I could foreshadow the little sister's development into a warrior princess, for instance. I could tell how she'd practiced swordfighting and climbed every tree in sight so she could grow up as fierce and strong and brave as her adored big brother. I could note the foolishness of Jack treating the giant like a personal problem when in fact his little farm was part of a great big nation which the giant might rightfully be seen as invading. And what about the harp? Did she resent Jack for having stolen her during his earlier foray? Did she miss living up in the clouds? Was she the medium by which the giant delivered his threat?

And so on, and so forth. And what's ridiculous about it is, it's probably not going to be commercially viable no matter how well I revise and expand it. The entire premise is from an exercise in a well-known (I think?) book on the subject, which other aspiring interactive fiction authors have no doubt already worked through themselves, and there aren't that many markets for interactive fiction at this time. So I really shouldn't let myself obsess over it, at least not until I've got a bunch of other projects out of my hair. Like, say, the short-short I want to expand into an interactive piece that actually is commercially viable. Hey, brain, maybe we should obsess on that story, and not on this one, what do you say?

Darn it, Muse! You are so inconvenient!

*Sigh.*

Lastly, some quick fictionette news: The freebie for August 2017 has been released. It's "Tina, Destroyer of Worlds," and you can now read/download it as an ebook, an audiobook, or as a webpage via Patreon regardless of your patron status. Also I finally put the Fictionette Artifacts for April in the mail. I hope not to take so long with the ones for May. If I take a whole month to do each one, I'll always be three months behind, and that would be depressing.

YPP Weekend Blockades, August 26-27: Wherein some things are prompt and others are tardy

So I'm late with the Friday Fictionette again, but that's no reason this blockade schedule can't be right on time. And this weekend it actually matters because there's no fewer than four blockades kicking off right at noon today. All of them are on Emerald. (So, yeah, I may have to take a few hours to earn a little PoE before I jump into the overdue writing project. Sorry kinda sorta.) Aren't you glad I'm posting this now and not several hours later?

The Cerulean Ocean also has a healthy itinerary for the weekend. That'll kick off later this afternoon and will be continued Sunday around a quarter past eleven. The YPP Forum highlights Tequila Sunrise's defense of Lagniappe Island and Blackstar's defense of Olive. Both flags promise a raffle to help incentivize your joining up and sticking around.

That's it for now! I'll post again when I've finally gotten yesterday's fictionette offering up and available. Hopefully that will be later today, but realistically it may take until Monday again. Argh. Sorry (and not kinda sorta either).

Standard reminders: Schedule is given in Pirate Time, or U.S. Pacific. Player flags link to Yoweb information pages; Brigand King Flags link to Yppedia Brigand King pages. BK amassed power given in parenthetical numbers, like so: (14). For more info about jobbing contacts, jobber pay, and Event Blockade battle board configuration, check the Blockade tab of your ocean's Notice Board. To get hired, apply under the Voyages tab.

YPP Weekend Blockades, August 19-20: Collect 'em all!

Saturday! Blockades! See below. Not a heck of a lot of them, to be sure, but on the Cerulean Ocean we appear to have a brand new flag making its first moves, so that's a thing.

And speaking of brand new, an event has been announced for this afternoon on the Obsidian Ocean. The flag Versus Terminus is offering everyone a leg up, regardless of their faction, in memorizing the ocean--or at least the island league points:

Never again will you have to look blank when someone mentions staring in to the Ember Eye or miss out on a skeleton fray merely because you have no way of whisking there. We will have a ship ported at every island for you to jump on and explore.

Between the hours of 2 and 3 PM Pirate Time, send Ush a /tell or apply on the Notice Board for a job with "The Midnight Society." Then you'll be free to whisk aboard their ships and visit the islands they're porting at. Soon "Yer Known World" will be complete, with every island open to you for the price of a whisking potion!

So I'm off to hop up and down on a few islands today. How 'bout you?

Standard reminders: Schedule is given in Pirate Time, or U.S. Pacific. Player flags link to Yoweb information pages; Brigand King Flags link to Yppedia Brigand King pages. BK amassed power given in parenthetical numbers, like so: (14). For more info about jobbing contacts, jobber pay, and Event Blockade battle board configuration, check the Blockade tab of your ocean's Notice Board. To get hired, apply under the Voyages tab.

but these words are also words

This is a blog post about self-accountability, self-appreciation, and word count. What words count? All words count. Because I wrote them, and I can count them.

Someone in one of my Habitica guilds created us a new guild Challenge--a set of Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos for us to add to our personal dashboards and compete with one another in completing. Or, more likely (knowing us), compete with ourselves and root each other on. These were, of course, writing challenges--hence my bothering telling you so. The hope was that as a result we'd also see more activity in Guild Chat, which had been mostly hitherto abandoned for Party Chat. This was unfortunate, because not everyone in our Guild is in the Party. Some of them are in other Parties, and you can't be in more than one Party at one time. So our friend created this Guild challenge.

The Challenge included some Habits which were daily word-count milestones: 100 words, 250, 750, and 1500. I wanted to participate, but up until then I hadn't really tracked word count per day--not outside of NaNoWriMo, anyway. I was only tracking hours per day spent on each day's writing tasks.

So I started tracking word count. I added a new column to my timesheet and started noting the amount of words written as well as the amount of time spent on each task.

Purely editing tasks weren't compatible with this, but it's amazing how few of my tasks are purely editing. I started noting how many words I'd added to that week's fictionette. I started noting how many words happened during freewriting. I even started jotting down the word-count of the daily blog post.

And I felt a little uneasy about this. Should I really "count" the words written in freewriting or blogging? Shouldn't I only count words written in new story drafts? Seriously, wasn't I just gaming the system?

Well, no. Not so much. What I was actually doing was giving myself an extra incentive to do my daily writings tasks. Furthermore, I was giving myself an excuse to celebrate having accomplished those tasks. And I needed that excuse, because the very fact of my questioning whether they "counted" revealed a nasty habit of self-sabotage.

I had convinced myself that some writing "didn't count." I'd convinced myself that I didn't deserve to feel proud of myself for accomplishing certain tasks. I could feel guilty for failing to accomplish them, but I wasn't allowed to celebrate succeeding. They didn't "count" as accomplishments.

Basically, it was the same ugly attitude I remember in my grandmother. I was very young and, in the way of the very young, acutely aware of parental injustice real and imagined. In this case, I maintain even now, it was real. I had noticed that she was swift to punish me for breaking her labyrinthine rules of etiquette and politeness, while my behaving well earned me merely neutral treatment. Basically, the best I could hope to earn with my very best behavior was not being punished. This seemed unfair. My very best behavior wasn't easy! I just wanted to know she appreciated the effort. But she said "Why should I reward you for doing what you ought to be doing already?"

(To be fair, this is the same argument we feminists use against men who demand gratitude and and a steady girlfriend as a reward for not having raped anyone. To be even more fair, these men are adults and theoretically no longer in the stage of childhood where they still need to be taught what good behavior is, or where they feel rewarded by any attention at all and so it behooves parents to reward good behavior with positive attention. Also, we aren't their parents.)

So, yeah. I'd come to define certain writing tasks as "what I ought to be doing already," so when I did them, I didn't think it much to brag on. Doing them wasn't enough to save me from the self-loathing of "Call yourself a writer? When did you last work on a salable story, huh? What have you done for your career lately?" ... it was only enough to reduce the self-loathing to "Well, at least you did something. You're not totally hopeless, I guess."

Which is no way to live.

At one point a while back, I had a big difficult email to write--lots of effort, difficult topic, project I had no enthusiasm for---and I resented the way it was going to crowd out my real writing hours. I decided that since it was writing, of a sort, I might as well count it toward my daily timesheet. If I had to do it, I might as well consider its hours as counting toward my 5-hour goal rather than bemoan its putting that goal out of reach.

Today I also had a difficult email to write. And I had a similar epiphany: Maybe I could break through the resistance by reclassifying it as one of this afternoon's writing tasks. I would put it on my timesheet, log the hours spent writing it, and also log the word count. Then I'd actually get something out of the ordeal besides the frustration of having lost the time I could have spent working on, say, my new story for Podcastle's Halloween-themed submission window.

So that's how an extra 3 hours 15 minutes and 1600 words got added to today's tally of writing done and words written. They weren't easy words or hours, so I'm damn well going to count them. (Also I spent about 20 minutes and 400-some words brainstorming on the Halloween submission, so win-win.)

I'm not going to get silly. I'm not going to start counting my hours spent and words written on reading blogs and writing comments thereon. But I'm not going to discount writing accomplishments anymore simply because they aren't the right shape. All the words count because I wrote them. I wrote them because they were worth writing. If they were worth writing, they damn well count. OK? OK.

This blog post is 1,051 words long and took 45 minutes to write. And that was worth writing, too.

this fictionette is good practice and also not to blame

Good evening! It is Friday; here is a Fictionette. "How Grief Transforms You" (ebook, audiobook) juxtaposes a bereft parent, obnoxious gossipy neighbors, and a mysterious phenomenon causing nightly havoc in the forest. It went more or less according to schedule, so it was not the reason I didn't go to the yoga class I was contemplating. That choice is better attributed to how very attractive the idea of a night spent at home was. Introvert, remember? Yeah. So, maybe next week with the yoga.

The Friday Fictionette project is having an unexpected beneficial effect. It's giving me a lot of practice at turning concept into outline into draft. I often have to start the week by writing an outline just because the base text--a freewriting exercise from the previous month--is such a rambling, incoherent mess. This is good. Because you know where else I need to be able to turn concept into outline and then outline into draft? Novel writing.

I have all these novel notes from last year that haven't get been turned into manuscript because, frankly, I'm kind of terrified of commitment. A scrivener document full of brainstorming, worldbuilding, and vague notes toward plot is a thing full of joyous potential. But writing the manuscript means making choices, committing to certain possibilities and rejecting others. It means closing doors and hemming myself in. (It also means writing a shitty first draft, which sucks because it means that the first time I read this novel it will be a shitty first draft. It's an unavoidable step in the process but I really wish it wasn't.)

So practicing this concept to outline to draft conversion in the short form every week will theoretically help make it No Big Deal when it's time to do it in the long form for a novel. Hooray for practice!

On the other hand, I hope to produce fewer rambling, incoherent messes going forward, as I'm trying to hold my freewriting sessions to the beginning-middle-end standard that I mentioned the other day. That way I can skip the outline phase entirely, or, at the very least, have already done the outline phase by the time I sit down to turn the piece into a Friday Fictionette.

This morning's freewriting, by the way, produced the first draft of the next story in what I'm calling the Posthuman Just So Stories series. (cf.) This one involves a faithful dog and a prankster rabbit. It possibly wears on its sleeve the influence of my frequently rereading Watership Down. On revision that factor will either become less noticeable or will look more like I did it on purpose all artful-like an' stuff.